Educational Discourse

I’m in a session with Donna Desroche from North Battleford. She was a library technologist and, just recently became a technology coordinator. She was having a great time doing this presentation!
Institutional Context – Comprehensive Community School that is very diverse with an alternate option and AP courses. The school was using Linux/redhat – made the change in 2000. This created some difficulty for the teachers who were use to other applications and had to switch. However, now that the system is stable, there is incredible access to the internet. The school has one-to-one acces. The students use the computers to: play games, chat, YouTube, MySpace, and other activities in the library – when done their work.
Teachers were uncertain, unsure, unprepared, uncomfortable. They now do attendance and marks online. They are using it for email.  A SELU survey revealed that the things were in place to use technology but the teachers were not ready. Therefore, support for the teachers was needed for technology use. They put in place – Information Literacy Program – for the teachers with  representatives from each department in the school. The committee had to learn some things before they began. They did some group learning and then pulled in some grade 9 teachers as the beginning place for the technology. Using online databases were important and the committee saw that there was a need to learn some different literacies.

From this came the formation of the research question and the proposal for the research  and a grant. The money was used to release time. They then began to establish information literacy benchmarks and create and conduct research about what was happening with students in the school.

To do the research they decided to use an information Problem Solving Model to work through the process. The Model – Prepare, find, use, share, evaluate – allowed them to see where they were at the start and what eventually took place on different levels. The grant required them to demonstrate learning/non-learning and the model helped them to demonstrate their findings.

Pre-Assessment – Based on Benchmarks using questions adapted the TRAILS benchmark questions – using the quiz portion of Moodle.

Moodle – course management system – which allows you to put all the information on the system that you require. Used the information – combined with information from Data-Driven Dialogue – to look at the data from the pre-assessment. There were some interesting things that the teachers found from this and were able to use. They then put the information on a wiki – which also has supports that teachers requested in order to help teachers to incorporate some of the things that were in the benchmarks and assessment. There were many different lesson plans that were created through this process and used with the students.

They then created the Living Sky School Division Information Literacy Portal using Drupal – the walled garden – keeping the tools within the confines of the school. This is not finished but is a work in progress. This will be used by teachers to help them find and use information more readily. The division continues to work on this, exploring ways to develop technology skills in their students.

Donna’s presentation was informative and interesting. There were several handouts with information. For more information, drop by her website at classroomtechtips.wordpress.com . Thanks Donna for an interesting and informative session.

I’m currently in Dean Shareski’s session on RSS. Dean is going to show us how to use RSS in a digital world. Dean and I have been communicating and sharing via blogging and discussions. We have discussed the use of the read/write web in creating new opportunities for students.

Dean began with a video on the Human Network. He explains the beginning of RSS – Real Simple Syndication – and the time when there were many different RSS readers. Dean does a good job of giving a technical description without being overwhelming.

Dean is giving a presentation on RSS – Real Simple Syndication – that will help people to build a RSS start. Dean begins the session giving a background on RSS. He begins by talking about how he began with RSS and the first uses of RSS with a number of different readers and how, over time, XML beame the standard format.

RSS allows you to subscribe to the different information sources – you pick what you want to see whether it be news or blogs or magazines.

Dean describes about how his RSS feeds are his research sources. He gets his information from the people who post and are on his RSS reader. It helps him to connect to other people. The RSS does not have spam unlike most email clients. In fact, you can narrow it down to a specific section of the information that you want. Blogs and newsites have RSS feeds, icons, that identify the page as one that can be used in a reader.

Dean then showed another video that gave a brief and simple explanation of RSS.
RSS is the next great tool in the spread of information and ultimately freedom: of expression, of communication, of information.

Ways of using RSS – Subscribe to people in your field. Find people who are working in your area and see what is happening and what they are doing. Dean then briefly described using social bookmarking and how it can help. He added some information about Technocrati and how it worked. Dean discussed how RSS can be used for updates flickr accounts, wikis, audio and video. In fact, you can subscribe to many just about anything that has a feed. You can also share your finds with other people using the share button. Another thing to do is to create an aggregated forum that collects RSS feeds for a particular topic or site like student blogs.

Dean moved on to describe how to get a RSS account. He highlighted GoogleReader and bloglines and what they do. From there Dean began an example of how to subsribe to a blog using RSS. He looked up an author and then began the process of subsribing to a blog using two different methods. First, using the subscribe to on the webpage. He then used the Subscribe to button on his browser.

Dean then did a search for a topic and demonstrated how to subscribe to a search in order to get information on a particular topic. H

Incredible That’s the only way I can describe the response to the book club idea.

Dave Truss and I are working on the beginning of putting things together and we’ll be up and running this week. I did get an email from Miguel who informed me that they are discussing Dan Pink’s book here. He invited us to join. Now, I don’t want to spurn Miguel as I think he is a great person with wonderful ideas but I’d like to see how this whole idea unfolds for us.

I’ve started a wiki for the club. We’d like to begin with that and see how this tool works. We have also been tossing around the idea of meeting in SL, using a discussion board or meeting in TappedIn. But, for now, we’ll go with the wiki. So, if you are interested, please leave a message in the Contact Me space with an email address where we can get messages to you plus any other information for us.

Now, I’m still waiting for the book. Might be here tomorrow but for sure next week. I can’t believe I’m so excited about a book arriving!! Let the reading begin!